Collected Poems 1931-74 (16 page)

Last of the great autumnal capitals

Disengaging daily like a sword

The civil codes, behaviour, friendship, love,

In houses of shining glass,

On tablecloths stained with pools of light,

By the rambling river's evening scents

Carried our freight of pain so lightly:

And towards evening when the inkwells overturn

And at last the figure which has sat

Motionless for hours, pours himself out

One glass of moonlight, drinks it, and retires.

By the railway arches a stone plinth.

Under the shadows of the lamps the figures.

So many ways of dividing up the self:

Correspondences moving outwards along a line

Of nerves, the memory of letters

Smelling like apples in an empty cupboard,

And at midnight the pall of clocks,

At odds among themselves, the shuffling

Of innumerable packs of cards where each shall see

One day his face instead of fortune's be.

Bound here to the great axis of the sex,

Black source that feeds your manners, gives

Information and vivacity to food and linen,

Determined as the penetration into self-abuse—

For each separation by kisses forges new bonds:

Three or four words on the back of a letter,

Tessa waiting on a corner with all she feels,

Rain glittering in that peacock's eye,

As heavy with sense as a king's letter with seals.

Here the professional observer met you,

The amateur in melancholy,

To the swish of an invisible fountain,

Drinking from a glass under a man on horseback,

Talking to a lady with a poisoned finger.

Women turned over by the mind and each

A proper noun, an act of trespass,

Improper for its aberration but accepted

As in a mirror one is twice but accepts.

So in these magazines of love they moved,

Experience misbegotten in each face like rings

In wood, were commentators on our weakness,

Through cycles of repentance in the blood,

Exhausted the body's ugly contents in a sigh,

Left, hard as ash, the object's shape: an art

Eros began, self-murder carries on.

Of all the sicknesses, autumnal Paris,

This self-infection was the best, where friends

Like self-possession could be learned

Through the mystery of a slit

Like a tear in an old fur coat,

A hole in a paper lantern where the seeing I

Looked out and measured one:

The ferocious knuckle of a sex

Standing to acknowledge like a hambone

Our membership in the body of a tribe

Holy and ridiculous at once:

Symbol of unrecognised desire, pain, pain.

You might have seen silence flower in eyes,

The tobacco eyes of every human critic,

Or a mouth laid along the meniscus

Of a lighted glass blazing like a diamond.

All the great brothels closed save Sacré Coeur!

Windows boarded up from the inheritors,

The nameless donors inhabiting marble fanes

On peninsulas with cocks of gold in sunlight,

Under the oleanders, printed in warm moss,

The bare ankles playing on a flute,

Selecting the bodies of boys, the temporary

Refuge for a kiss on the silver backs of mirrors:

Powder of statues in a grove born old,

Born sightless, wingless, never to be loved.

Crude man in his coat of nerves and hair

Whose kisses like apostles go about

On translated business never quite his own,

Derives from the obscure medium of the body,

As through some glass coffin, a retrievéd sprite,

Himself holding the holy bottle, fast asleep.

All these rotten galleries were symbols

Of us, where the girls like squirrels

Leaned in the tarnished mirrors sadly sighing:

The wind in empty clothing, while the destroyer

Sorted the bottles for just the right medicine.

Below us, far below on the stairway somewhere

Tessa had already combed the dark disorder

Of curls, the flash of pectorals in a mirror,

Invented already this darker niece of Egypt,

Who leaves the small hashish-pipe by the pillow,

Uneasy in red slippers like the dust in urns,

The smashed columns, wells full of leaves,

The faces white as burns.

We suffer according to the terms we make

With time in cities: allowing to be rooted from us

Like useless teeth the few great healers

Who understand the penalties of confession,

And cannot fear these half-invented Gods,

Inhabiting our own cities of unconquered pain.

Now the capitals settle slowly in the sea

Of their failures. All the common brute has done

Building like a rat the rotten shanties

Of his self-esteem beside the water's edge,

His fear and prejudice into a dead index.

It is not enough. We have still to outgrow

The prohibitions in us with the fears they grow from:

For the beloved will be no happier

Nor the unloved less hungry when the miracle begins:

Yet both will be ineffably disclosed

In their own natures by simplicity

Like roses in a giving off of grace.

1948/
1947

An old man tamed his garden with wet clay

Until Pomona rose, a bubble in his arms.

The time and place grow ripe when the idea

Marries its proper image in volition,

When desire and intention kiss and bruise.

A cord passed round the body of the mermaid

Drew her sleeping from the underworld,

As when the breath of resin like a code

Rises from some unguarded still, Pomona

Breathing, surely a little out of breath

The image disengaging from the block,

A little out of breath, and wondering

If art is self-reflection,
who
he was

She woke within the side of,
what
old man

In his smock and dirty cap of cloth,

Drinking through trembling fingers now

A ten year siege of her, the joy in touching

The moistened flanks of her idea with all

An old man's impatience of the carnal wish?

1948/
1948

Poetry, science of intimacies,

In you his early roots drove through

The barbarian compost of our English

To sound new veins and marbled all his verses

Through and through like old black ledgers,

Hedging in pain by form, and giving

Quotations from the daily treaty poets make

With men, possessions or a private demon:

Became at last this famous solitary

Sitting at one bleak uncurtained window

Over wintry London patiently repeating

That art is determined by its ends

In conscience and in morals. This was startling.

Yet marriages might be arranged between

Old fashions and contemporary disorders.

Sole student of balance in a falling world

He helped us mend the little greenstick fractures

Of our verse, taught polish in austerity.

Others who know him will add private humours,

And photographs to albums; taken near Paris,

Say, drinking among some foreign dons all night

From leather bubbles in a tavern: a remark

That silenced a fussy duke: yet these

Alluding and delimiting can only mystify

The singer and his mystery more, they do not chain.

Neither may we ever explain but pointing

To a new star one needs new vision for

Like some late hornbeam risen over England,

Relate it to a single sitting man,

In a high window there, beside a lamp,

Some crumpled paper, a disordered bed.

1980/
1948

They never credit us

With being bad enough

The boys that come to edit us:

Of simply not caring when a prize,

Something for nothing, comes our way,

A wife, a mistress, or a holiday

From People living neckfast in their lies.

No: Shakespear's household bills

Could never be responsible, they say,

For all the heartbreak and the 1,000 ills

His work is heir to, poem, sonnet, play …

Emended readings give the real reason:

The times were out of joint, the loves, the season.

Man With A Message—how could you forget

To read your proofs, the heartache and the fret?

The copier or the printer

Must take the blame for it in all

The variants they will publish by the winter.

‘By elision we quarter suffering.' Too true.

‘From images and scansion can be learned.' …

Yet under it perhaps may be discerned

A something else afoot—a Thing

Lacking both precedent and name and gender:

An uncreated Weight which left its clue,

Making him run up bills,

Making him violent or distrait or tender:

Leaving for Stratford might have heard It say:

‘Tell them I won't be back on Saturday.

My wife will understand I'm on a bender.'

And to himself muttering, muttering: ‘Words

Added to words multiply the space

Between this feeling and my expressing It.

The wires get far too hot. Time smoulders

Like a burning rug. I
will
be free.' …

And all the time from the donkey's head

The lover is whispering: ‘This is not

What I imagined as Reality.

If
truth
were
needles
surely
eyes
would
see?'

1948/
1948

A philosopher in search of human values

Might have seen something in the coarse

Black boots the guide wore when he led us:

Boots with cracked eyes and introspective

Laces, rich in historical error as this

Old wall we picked the moss from, reading

Into it invasions by the Dorians or Medes.

But the bearded arboreal historian

Saw nothing of it all, was nothing then.

His education had derailed the man

Until he moved, a literary reminiscence,

Through quotations only, fine as hair.

The stones spoke to him. Reflected there

In a cistern I heard you thinking: Europe

Also, the whole of our egopetal culture

Is done for and must vanish soon.

And still we have not undergone the poet's truth.

Could he comfort us in more than this

Blue sea and air cohering blandly

Across that haze of flats,

The smoking middens of our history—

Aware perhaps only of the two children

Asleep in the car beside a bear in cotton gloves?

1948/
1948

Le
saltimbanque
is coming with

His heels behind his head.

His smile is mortuary and

His whole expression dead.

The acrobat, the acrobat,

Demanding since the Fall

Little enough but hempen stuff

To climb and hang us all.

Mysterious inventions like

The trousers and the hat

Bewitched our real intentions:

We sewed the fig-leaves flat.

Man sewed his seven pockets

Upon his hairy clothes

But woman in her own white flesh

Has one she seldom shows.

An aperture on anguish,

A keyhole on disgrace:

The features stay grimacing

Upon the mossy face.

A cup without a handle

A staff without a crook,

The sawdust in the golly's head,

The teapot with the nook.

The Rib is slowly waking

Within the side of Man

And
le
guignol
is making

Its faces while it can.

Compose us in the finder

Our organs upside down,

The parson in his widow's weeds,

The doctor in his gown.

What Yang and Yin divided

In one disastrous blunder

Must one day be united and

Let no man put asunder.

1948/
1948